'Mother robot' builds and refines its own kids through 'natural selection'

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a 'mother robot' that can build its own 'children'.

The mother can also test its children and evaluate their performance in order to improve the results when it designs the next generation of robots -- passing down desirable traits, but 'breeding out' less successful ones. Beyond the initial instruction to build robots capable of movement, there is no intervention either by humans or by computers.

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In five different experiments the mother robot built and tested generations of ten robots. The results of these experiments were published in journal PLOS One and showed that the mother robot was capable of identifying the best traits of the robots and passing them down to the next generation, to the point where they were able to perform a set task twice as quickly as the fittest individuals in the first generation. The researchers describe this as a kind of robot natural selection. "Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on," explained Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich. "That's essentially what this robot is doing -- we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species."

The set task each 'child' had to complete was travelling as far as possible from a starting point in a set amount of time. The most successful children were unchanged in the next generation, but the less successful children had their 'genomes' altered. Each of the robot's genomes consisted of up to five different 'genes', containing all the information about the physical properties and computational abilities of that robot.

The feedback from each stage of the experiment not only resulted in the fine tuning of robot children across generations, but also caused the mother robot to be able to invent new shapes and movement patterns, including some that a human designer would not have been able to build. "One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about -- we're using robotics to explore this mystery," said Iida. "We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they're typically designed for mass production instead of mass customisation, but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity."